Scandalous sentences for Scottish skippers | Greenpeace UK

Organised crime seems to pay quite handsomely, especially if you manage to be part of a profession that seems to be beyond reproach. That can surely be the only conclusion to draw from the group of 17 fishermen who were fined a mere £720 thousand in court today for an overfishing scam that effectively stole £63 MILLION of fish from our seas. The case has been dragging on for many years, and uncovered a huge network designed to bypass the official systems to land illegal fish in vast quantities. This involved skippers on boats, processing factories on land, doctored weighing machines, and even secret pipes to surreptitiously siphon off the illicit fish. The Judge described the whole operation as ‘cynical and sophisticated’, yet the sentence seems to make a mockery of the sheer scale of the crime. The fish involved were mackerel and herring, caught by large boats in the pela...